Boot to Root: The Cipher Chain
You will need the attached QR codes to complete this.
Description: You have bypassed the physical hardware restrictions and secured the initial foothold. Now, you must escalate your privileges to absolute control.
Hidden in the physical environment are five sequential data drops in the form of QR codes. A standard smartphone scan will yield a Base64 string, but that is merely an encoding wrapper. The true payloads are heavily encrypted.
You must establish an air gap protocol to transfer this data to your terminal. Your cipher is AES-256-CBC with PBKDF2. The payload from the first drop will contain the passphrase to decrypt the second, chaining all the way to the final target.
Find the drops, decode the wrappers, decrypt the network daemons, and claim root access.
Points: 200
